I tried loading your Quill file: text_doc in the previous message, with Quill v2.35 flp version from the QL Homepage and the The Distribution files.

The file text_doc can not be loaded.

I also tried Norman QStripper, which reported that the file "test_doc" did not have the correct header file, see screen dump of error message window.

QStripper_Error.png (13.93 KiB) Viewed 2475 times

I loaded SMSQmualtor with Quill v2.35 and just executed the QUILL programme and saved and loaded a quill file. I did have to insert the device, i.e. win1_text_doc

Okay this was an emulator, but I do not think there is any difference to usoing Quill on a a real QL. Most Quill versions were designed for 128K machines with microdrives.

The new QL hardware, SD, CFD cards, Qubide hard drives, use Quill in the same way. The only problem is that with a QL with lots of memory Quill grabs all the remaining memory, the solution is to use the Guardian option in the QPAC2 System. Since this is now freely available not a problem.

OK, looks like you have a decent amount of memory, quill should be OK.

Stupid question time, you do have free space on the sd drive? Sorry, but I had to ask!

Can you send me the quill executable that you are using? Zipped if possible. Send to norman (at) dunbar (hyphen) it (dot) co (dot) uk - you know the score, change the bits in brackets to whatever characters.

Why do they put lightning conductors on churches?If at first you don't succeed, don't take up skydiving!If you think your job is pointless, remember, there's someone in Germany who fits indicators to BMWs.

I was only really wanting the quill executable to be honest, but I'll see what I can do when I have a moment or two. We have a medical problem in the family just now that's taking a lot of our time, so progress won't be as fast as I had hoped, sorry.

Why do they put lightning conductors on churches?If at first you don't succeed, don't take up skydiving!If you think your job is pointless, remember, there's someone in Germany who fits indicators to BMWs.

I have transferred PSION's office (from http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/psions/index.html) to my QUBIDE CF card and everything works fine except for saving QUILL documents. When I try to save a document created in QUILL and load it back I get error:

Not a valid QUILL file

I have transferred file to PC and after examination I realized that all files saved by Quill are 64 bytes (see attached file).

Files saved in Easel, Abacus, Archive are correct and they are loading fine. What could be wrong with Quill?

Have you found a solution meanwhile? If not and if you are still interested in this topic I can state that I god the very same problem of not being able to save any Quill documents to the QUBIDE drive but I was able to workaround that by a small background job which reserves some memory before Quill is started and releases this memory afterwords. This avoids that Quill consumes all of the QL's memory which is the obvious reason why accessing QUBIDE does not work. If you are interested I can share this program with you.

You need to transfer them to your QL and unzip them there in order to maintain QDOS file headers.

quill_qubidefix.zip : provides my operational Quill version with a patched boot basic program. Unzip it to your win1_quill folder.protmem.zip : provides the source code of the heap memory reservation utility. I used C68 to compile this on the QL

Start Quill then with the command 'lrun win1_quill_boot'. You should be able to save your documents to your IDE driver (SD card).

I have been speaking with Alain Haoui who has looked into this some more and yes, it seems that the issue with Quill is because it grabs all of the memory - the problem is that the level 2 driver built into the QubIDE needs to be able to load the directory record into memory before it can handle file access, but has no room to load it because of Quill !

The original v1.56 driver for QubIDE does not report any error for some reason. However, Alain has now tried his new QubATA 3.x driver with Zaxon's QubIDE clone (see other thread) and whilst this cannot fix the issue, it does report "Unable to open file" in Quill, so that you know the file has not been saved.

Without QPAC2, the best way to avoid Quill grabbing all memory is to use a Quill mod available with this patch utility from Dilwyn site made by Martin Head (http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/psions/Psion_Mod.zip) This allows you to limit the memory used by Quill but you need TK2 installed, because you have to pass the size of memory to use as a parameter to the patched version of Quill.

Alain has sent Dilwyn a copy of his v2.30 Quill patched (ready to use), but if you want to patch your own version of Quill you will need to:

You can also try this program, which was published in QL World long ago. It has the additional advantage, that it enables the cursor of the first CON channel. So even the Psion programs have then a flashing cursor near the top left corner and you can switch in out of them with CTRL-C WITHOUT Pointer Interface!

If you have a Minerva or SMSQ-ROM you should change the RETurn in function SYS_VARS (last function) to: RETURN VER$(-2)